SF Gate: Top home-school texts dismiss Darwin, evolution.
“If I’m planning to write a curriculum, and I want to write it in a way that will appeal to home-schoolers, I’m going to at least find out what my demographic is.” Once again, capitalism doesn’t give a damn about what is right ... only about what is profitable. Simple social responsibility would dictate that you’d want to encourage kids to have the tools they need to create the next engineering or scientific marvels, raising us all up ... instead, they’re being primped as Wal-Mart cart corral managers.
Inside Higher Ed: Grades on the Rise.
“Since the 1960s, the national mean G.P.A. at the institutions from which he’s collected grades has risen by about 0.1 each decade – other than in the 1970s, when G.P.A.s stagnated or fell slightly. In the 1950s, according to Rojstaczer’s data, the mean G.P.A. at U.S. colleges and universities was 2.52. By 2006-07, it was 3.11.”
Aspen no. 5+6, item 3: Three Essays.
I take you directly to The Aesthetics of Silence / Susan Sontag. Via wood s lot.
BBC News: Dinosaur extinction link to crater confirmed.
“The explosion of hot rock and gas would have looked like a huge ball of fire on the horizon, grilling any living creature in the immediate vicinity that couldn’t find shelter. [snip] The final nail in the coffin for the dinosaurs happened when blasted material was ejected at high velocity into the atmosphere. This shrouded the planet in darkness and caused a global winter, killing off many species that couldn’t adapt to this hellish environment.” Cue Pat Benatar.
Discover Magazine: Etched Ostrich Eggs Give Window on Stone Age Humans’ Symbolic Thinking.
“A cache of ostrich eggshell fragments discovered by archaeologists in South Africa could be instrumental in understanding how humans approached art and symbolism as early as the Stone Age. The eggshells, engraved with geometric designs, may indicate the existence of a symbolic communication system around 60,000 years ago among African hunter-gatherers [Discovery News].” So, artists are actually ... the original eggheads?
NY Times: Are There Secular Reasons?
“It is not, Smith tells us, that secular reason can’t do the job (of identifying ultimate meanings and values) we need religion to do; it’s worse; secular reason can’t do its own self-assigned job — of describing the world in ways that allow us to move forward in our projects — without importing, but not acknowledging, the very perspectives it pushes away in disdain.” Time you recommend that you read ”The Closing of the Western Mind” again.
Discover: Space Is Getting Bigger, and It’s Getting Bigger Faster.
“Few scientists can say their work forever changed how we see the universe. Saul Perlmutter is one of them, for his central role in the 1998 discovery of dark energy. That invisible energy, which accounts for a whopping 73 percent of everything in the cosmos, is stretching the fabric of space and could cause a runaway expansion of the universe.” In case you needed something other than global warming to worry about ...
Atlantic, Business: Secret to Happiness, Solved: Go to College, Move West.
“The Atlantic’s demographic expert Richard Florida poured through some data on his blog yesterday and concluded that the factor that correlated most highly with cities’ self-reported happiness was ... percentage of college degrees. Does that mean, as Catherine Rampell offers, that education makes you happy?”
Yale Environment 360: An Ominous Warning on the Effects of Ocean Acidification.
“The PETM was powerful enough to trigger widespread extinctions in the deep oceans. Today’s faster, bigger changes to the ocean may well bring a new wave of extinctions. Paleontologists haven’t found signs of major extinctions of corals or other carbonate-based species in surface waters around PETM. But since today’s ocean acidification is so much stronger, it may affect life in shallow water as well.”
NY Times: ‘Rubbers - The Life, History and Struggle of the Condom.’
“It is partly because condoms graphically suggest the sex act that they have so often been known through their covers: a collection of boxes and containers here range from antique exoticism (picturing desert camels) to whimsical contemporaneity (portraits of candidates from the last presidential election).” Oh, you know who I want to see on a prophylactic box.
BBC News: China dinosaur footprints found in Zhucheng.
Like I’ve said a dozen times before ... I want to be a paleontologist in China. They’re having all the fun.
Discover Magazine: The Real Rules for Time Travelers.
“Logical contradictions cannot occur.”
NY Times: Steven Strogatz, From Fish to Infinity.
Revisit Math. From preschool to grad school, in installments.
NPR: Atmospheric Dry Spell Eases Global Warming.
“It turns out that starting in the year 2000, a narrow layer of the stratosphere dried out quite rapidly. And water in the atmosphere traps heat, like glass in a greenhouse. So less stratospheric water means less warming.” As scientists find more mitigating factors, factors they did not know of when they declared the globe warming, one wonders how all these new pieces fit into the ‘story’ of climate change. Is there a current ‘overview’ site of some kind?
NPR: Humans Were Born To Run Barefoot.
I think it would be more accurate to say humans run sub-optimally in modern sneakers. It should be obvious we were ‘born to run barefoot.’ Note, and I quote, “I mean, I think we have to be really, really careful about what we do and don’t know. We have not done any injury studies; this is not an injury study.”
Design View / Andy Rutledge: Again With the Risks.
A designer reads an article by Garry Kasparov, chess master, and mentions the metaphors of chess vs. poker when discussing risk. Here’s the original article the writer references.
Kasparov comes to this unoriginal conclusion late. Von Neumann laid out this conclusion over 60 years ago with his scholarly treatment of game theory, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, 1944. That’s a little dense, I’ll mention you can read a simplified synopsis in Strategy in Poker, Business and War.
Simply, Von Neumann states chess should be able to be played to a win or a draw ... because you have ‘perfect information’, full knowledge of the opponent’s moves and potential moves. This is a departure from real life, and a failure of the metaphor and most of the strategic ‘benefits’ chess provides. Poker, you have no such luxury. It’s more like the real world, strategically. You must bluff. You must play your opponent’s hand. And more.
John Nash (’A Beautiful Mind’), extended Von Neumann’s work, and became a Nobel Laureate for his work. Nice to see that tortured soul get some recognition (I remember him clearly from my youth in Princeton, baggy chinos and a haunted look on his face as he went to and from Firestone Library).
Ultimately, I’ll take this designer’s article and agree - play poker. Dump the chess. You’ll be the better designer, the better businessperson for it.
[Longtime readers will be sick of hearing about this one. My apologies. I get tired of today’s celebrities thinking they’re originals, when their revelations have been covered decades before.]
SF New Mexican: Meet Encanto.
The public supercomputer that will make 3-D technology available at 33 sites in N.M.
Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert’s Journal: Review of two films.
A Superwoman for Kenya, but America is still waiting for Superman. “The most powerful opponents to better teaching are the teachers’ unions. I am a lifelong supporter of unions. But ‘Waiting for Superman’ makes this an inescapable conclusion. A union that protects incompetent and even dangerous teachers is an obscenity.” I recall a certain mathematics course where we were graded on a curve, and the teacher was so inept that we were getting “A’s” for scoring 10 right questions out of 100. I should have complained. Put me behind in calculus the next year.
Chronicle of Higher Ed: A good ‘general’ education.
Narrow Skills Training Won’t Prepare Students for Jobs in Global Economy, Liberal-Arts Group Says. “An organization that advocates for ‘practical liberal education’ for undergraduates says the push to increase America’s college-going rate, now being championed by President Obama and others, is too limited and could leave too many students with narrow training that fails to equip them for jobs — and for lives — in the global economy.” After college, I asked everyone I met, in each place I worked in, what their major was in school. I estimate less than 10% were actually *using* their major. Of note, when I worked for Moseley Hallgarten Estabrook & Weeden in the Wall Street financial district, I mostly ran across Philosophy and English majors. Philosophy! Not business-track financial majors. So I agree with the AACU.
NYTimes: Half-day school? I would haved loved this as a kid …
In Germany, a Tradition Falls, and Women Rise. “Manuela Maier was branded a bad mother. [snip] Her crime? Signing up her 9-year-old son when the local primary school first offered lunch and afternoon classes last autumn — and returning to work.”
The Chronicle of Higher Education: But of course! Pad the bottom line.
Colleges Snap Up Real Estate in Buyers’ Markets. The full article’s behind a pay-for wall. But I wanted to take the opportunity to comment that Princeton University, when I moved away from Princeton in ‘96, made more money off their real estate than any other asset. Scuttlebutt was that they didn’t really need to run the University anymore. So this does *not* surprise me one bit.
Zen Moments: Good lies.
My Favorite Liar. “Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.”
Straight from the horse’s mouth.
Student Grades Not Affected by Social Networking, New Research Finds. “The study also showed that Facebook and YouTube are the most popular social media platforms with college students, with 96 percent of students saying they use Facebook and 84 percent saying they use YouTube. Only 20 percent said they use blogs, 14 percent use Twitter, 12 percent use MySpace and 10 percent use LinkedIn.”
Discover Magazine: Unfortunately, we’re not crocodiles.
The Origin of the Future: Death by Mutation? “… this week, the evolutionary biologist Michael Lynch has published a provocative paper (to mark his inauguration into the National Academy of Sciences) in which he makes another kind of forecast. Our future evolution, he warns, is going to lead to a devastating decline in our health.”
NY Times: What’s that again?
How to Train the Aging Brain. “We need to know stuff. But we need to move beyond that and challenge our perception of the world. If you always hang around with those you agree with and read things that agree with what you already know, you’re not going to wrestle with your established brain connections.”
